The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

by Issa Rae

  “Hey, Remington,” I started, shyly. “Are you going to the dance?”

  He didn’t miss a beat: “Not with you!”

  His friends didn’t even try to hide their laughter. Not a single one. I smiled and tried to play it off.

  “Oh. No—I didn’t mean that. You thought I was asking for me?”

  But it was too late; they had already pushed past to leave me in the classroom alone, my Environmental Studies teacher avoiding eye contact with me.

  Ever optimistic, I went to the dance by myself, with the hope that maybe a boy there would ask me to dance. Maybe it would be Quentin, the skinny, half-albino/half-effeminate boy to whom I’d been sending “secret admirer” letters. It was the least he could do, after excitedly exposing to the class that I had been writing him love notes for weeks. Despite my humiliation, I couldn’t really blame him. It happened naturally enough. The homeroom teacher brought up “secret admirers” in her announcement about Valentine’s Day grams.

  “Does anyone know what a ‘secret admirer’ is?” she asked.

  “I do! I do, Ms. Nash!”

  My heart plummeted to my stomach as I noticed him anxiously looking in my direction.

  “What do you know about secret admirers, Quentin?” asked Ms. Nash.

  “That girl right there was writing me ‘secret admirer’ notes.” He smiled at me, as if his public acknowledgment didn’t violate the very purpose of the “secret” in “secret admirer.”

  Surely, he would save me from walking around the junior high dance all alone, in the jean jumper and white turtleneck I had packed in my backpack just for this after-school occasion. (I never wore dresses.) Somebody had to take notice and ask me to dance, based on that alone. Unfortunately, no one ever asked.

  I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that boys didn’t find me attractive. That was heartbreaking. My self-esteem was in danger and had it not been for the saving grace of the Instant Message feature on AOL, I probably would have suffered death by trying too hard.

  I don’t remember the first time I typed to a stranger. It wasn’t monumental for me. But it did speak to a desire to escape myself. For one thing, I could be anyone I wanted to be online. With each swift keystroke, a new, fearless identity emerged. I could be light-skinned with long hair, or blue-eyed with blond hair. Or experienced, witty, and seductive—things nobody saw me as in real life. I could be anyone’s type and was able to do so because during the early stages of AOL, pictures were pretty rare, though around the time that IMs came along, home scanners were growing more popular. Thankfully, however, pictures took forever to upload and weren’t in high demand, so people were content with self-descriptions. As people tended to be quite generous in their descriptions of themselves, I figured I could be, too. What did it matter?

  “A/S/L,” the pop-up conversation would start.

  Age/Sex/Location? (This blatant acronym had to have been tooled by pedophiles. The genius!) There was something flattering about being selected out of a pool of thirty to sixty people in a chat room for a private talk. I’d imagine it was like being chosen at a party to dance, though I wouldn’t know anything about that. But for my chameleon-esque purposes, responding to this conversation opener was the hardest part. I couldn’t become a type if I didn’t know what I was working with. If I were in the mood to talk to someone my age, I’d be honest.

  “11/F/Cali, u?”

  “13/f/az. hi.”

  Trick, I don’t want no friends right now! On to the next. Sometimes I’d be the pursuer. I’d visit the R&B, Rap, or Games chat rooms and scout screen names that would give me hints at my preferred types: soccrplaya83, muscleman39, blkboy17. All I had were snippets of open chats to go by. What were they contributing to the larger public conversation? I couldn’t choose someone who was too active in the chat room; his chances of committing to a one-on-one were slim. Besides, someone who revels in being the center of attention is not my type. I don’t like to compete. Instead, I went for those who would contribute a few meaningful phrases here and there: “games are cool” or “yah i love r. kelly.” Subtle hints like those were enough to provoke me to reach out.

  I’d begin:

  SuGaLuv112: “hi. a/s/l?”

  muscleman39: “18/m/de. u??”

  SuGaLuv112: “17/f/cali.”

  muscleman39: “cool, what’s up?”

  SuGaLuv112: “nothin. chillin. bored.”

  muscleman39: “are you horny?”

  What? Like rhinos? My knowledge of internet slang was coming up empty. But I tried.

  SuGaLuv112: “what do u you mean?”

  Then came the door-slam sound effect from my computer speakers.

  muscleman39 has signed off.

  After a couple of weeks, and some more of these incidents, I decided to finally look up the definition of “horny.” What was being asked of me? My Encarta CD-ROM produced no answers, but Yahoo was full of them.

  hor-ny (hôr nē): desiring of sexual activity.

  Oh my freaking God. Of course. YES! That’s exactly what I was. The answer to what I was looking for in so many ways was being dangled before me, and all I had to do was respond with a simple “yes.” I couldn’t wait for the next opportunity to showcase my new personality trait. I sought it, thirstily. This time ready for the exchange and wealth of knowledge that would follow. I was so appropriately excited and ready.

  My first online relationship started off innocently enough. Every day after school, around three thirty, I would log on. It was the perfect time. My mom, who was too tired to worry about her remaining three kids, after dealing with one hundred plus of her French students, would go take a nap. During that time, nobody could go in and disturb her. Unless there was a fire, or an intruder—Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t count—we had all learned by swift-slap punishment that we were to respect her nap time. It was the one time slot of the day—thirty minutes or sometimes a whole hour—that our adult supervision was lenient. Occasionally, I would play bossy and order my siblings around on behalf of my mother, but for the most part, I left them alone to focus on my own debauchery and thus began my first real online relationship.

  He was nineteen; I had turned twelve. My parents were seven years apart, so . . . I guess it was cool? He described himself as white, athletically built, bald, with a red beard. When I first saw American History X years later, in high school, I had a flash memory of him, as if I’d met him in a previous life. He was “pretty average looking” by his description, but by my imagination, he was beautiful. He was sensitive. He asked me—Jennifer was my white-girl name (same number of syllables as Jo-Issa)—about my day, about how I was doing. He expressed his feelings for me. Told me he felt stupid for thinking about me all the time when we’d never met. To him, I was blond-haired, blue-eyed, and petite. Technically, I was petite for an adult person, but definitely oversized for a sixth-grader.

  Our conversations started out pretty casually at first, but they escalated quickly. And then he made the first move.

  redbeard19: what are you wearing?

  SuGaLuv112: a tank top and shorts

  By then, I knew how to play the game. I had been asked the question via IM multiple times enough to know that a T-shirt, baggy jeans, and sneakers wasn’t sexy enough. With redbeard19, I was slightly seasoned, and he only helped me to get better. He taught me so much about what ideal sex was supposed to be, what I could expect from future relationships. This was the prelude to sexting. The crazy part is, nothing about this turned me on. It was a learning experience for me. I would type what guys wanted to hear, while reading Spider-Man comic books or as Tiny Toon Adventures played in the background, satisfied that, while most of my peers were still virgins, at age twelve, I was mastering the art of cybersex.

  After that first time, I started to feel a sense of guilt. In the classroom, I was anxious, worried that eyes were on me. I started to wonder if wh
at I did was wrong. What would my teachers think if they knew? My parents? Could people tell? Did I look different?

  One day in the spring, I sat in Ms. Frank’s English class, unusually quiet. The teacher’s pet, I owned this class. She reminded the class of that often, which only escalated their hatred of me. But that day, sick and in pain, I just didn’t feel well. It was as if the butterflies inside my stomach had turned into dark moths, with razor-sharp antennas that were poking my sides and my midsection. I felt nauseous and dizzy. What was happening to me? I hadn’t even had real sex!

  Ms. Frank excused me to the nurse’s office and I clutched my stomach and my throbbing head, worried about my pending diagnosis. I stopped at the restroom first to see if maybe I was experiencing a case of lunch food poisoning. And in that bathroom stall I discovered that, just like “Sally” in the Sex-Ed section of the Health textbook we had studied that winter, my body had begun to succumb to its transition to womanhood. Or as I thought at the time, Ew gross, my vag is bleeding.

  I told the nurse I’d just gotten my period and she was super sympathetic, asking me if I wanted to go home. I did. I called my mother, who was transitioning into her new role as a stay-at-home mom and whispered my news into the phone.

  “Mom, I got my pe . . .”

  “What? Are you at school?”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I got my period.”

  “Aww. My schubalubbalubba. I’m coming.”

  During the car ride home, as my mom snuck peeks at me and patted my leg for comfort, I wondered if I were being punished for my “fast” behavior. In Health class, we learned that a girl’s period typically came around the time she was a teenager. I had just turned twelve. I was in a rush to grow up, but I didn’t know if I wanted to be “grown” yet. I didn’t want to be a woman, because that meant more responsibilities and expectations, and I was way too lazy for responsibilities and expectations. But then, my mom assuaged my worries with a simple declaration that changed everything for me.

  “Guess you’re a teenager now.”

  To hell with being a woman, I was a teenager. Teenagers like the kids on 90210 and Saved by the Bell. Finally! That was the missing link of my identity, and this bloody punctuation served as a head start to my new identity. I was a horny teenager.

  My relationship with redbeard19 progressed as scanners became more readily available and he sent me a picture. He was nervous to do so, but he felt like I should see him. I was so excited. But also nervous. By then, I’d had several online flings here and there, but he was the only one with whom I had something “real.” Also up until then, his face was an open canvas. It could change depending on what he said, or my mood. He wasn’t a fully real person to me, with real feelings and real desires. He could have been lying to me in the same way that I was lying to him. We both could have had Tiny Toons on our television screens, scrambling to come up with novel sex words to stimulate each other. But the picture he sent demonstrated to me two things: 1) he was pretty damn honest—he appeared just as he said he would, and 2) he was actually kind of cute.

  Something about our relationship wasn’t the same after that. I felt like a fraud, and I was kind of turned off by how vulnerable he’d made himself. I stopped becoming available to him at the same time every day. I’d block him whenever I felt like prowling for new people to talk to, then unblock him when I was bored. He grew hurt and needy, and I grew disgusted and cold.

  redbeard19: what are you wearing today, baby?

  SuGaLuv112: clothes.

  redbeard19: take them off.

  [5 minutes later]

  redbeard19: u still there?

  SuGaLuv112: sorry, was on the phone.

  redbeard19: you don’t have time for me anymore

  SuGaLuv112 has signed off.

  After that, I kept him blocked. By now, I was becoming a pro. Some kids had after-school sports, some had piano lessons, but “cybering” was now my after-school activity of choice. And for the most part, it felt safe. I wasn’t “doing it” for real, so I was still pure. My actions were justified because I could still wear white for my future wedding (which, as with Zack and Kelly, would probably happen in college).

  Now, pictures became a priority for me. If you didn’t have a picture, I wasn’t interested. As the most beautiful and sexy girl on the internet, I had a right to be picky. Not too much later, I met the guy of my dreams online. He sent me his picture after we got into a casual conversation about music. He was twenty-two, Italian, and black. He was one of the finest guys I had ever seen in my life, much less online. And he had multiple pictures of himself, so I knew it was real. Or was it? Thinking back, he sent me some very polished pictures—very modelesque. But whatever—he was real to me. I know he was real because he said he was Italian and black. And when we spoke on the phone, for the first time, he sounded like he was Italian and black; a Luigi-and-Tyrone hybrid, if you will.

  His voice was so freaking sexy, though. I can’t recall what we would have talked about, what kind of engaging conversation starters came out of my twelve-year-old mouth. I just remember wondering why such a hottie like him was looking for people to talk to online. He seemed like the kind of guy who people would go out of their way to talk to. Just when I began to convince myself that this hot guy was courting me for me, he started pressing me for a picture. Shit. I had insisted that I didn’t have a scanner in the past, but in an effort to keep him around, so he wouldn’t get bored with me, I told him I planned to get one, just for him. So began the search. I’d have to do my best to find a picture that matched the description I gave him. He already thought I was eighteen. He thought I was African-American and light-skinned with long hair. So, thankfully, those nonspecifics gave me lots of options.

  I don’t remember where or how I found the picture—but she was gorgeous. She was who I wished I looked like. She looked like she could have been mixed race. My middle school peers would be all over her. In fact, I’m pretty sure I printed her picture out and told all the guys she was my cousin. “That’s your cousin?! What side of the family? Where does she live?”

  I sent him the picture, holding my breath. Would he believe me? Boy, did he! He was awestruck and excited, as if he’d hit the online jackpot. His interest in me grew: What did I do? Did I model? Was I dating? It felt amazing to be so beautiful. I envied the life of the real girl whose picture I stole. Did she know how lucky she had it? How easy her life was because she was so beautiful? And then the Blatalian wanted more. Maybe he was suspicious. Maybe he, too, felt like it was too good to be true. “Send me another picture,” he demanded one day.

  My heart started racing. How was I going to find another picture to send him? Since I was now supposedly the proud owner of a scanner, I had no excuse. So I went on another online scavenger hunt, this time to try to find a girl who resembled the fake me. I found one; she was light-skinned with curly hair and posed in the shower, half-naked. She looked like she could have been partially Asian. But the initial picture I sent him was black-and-white and the new picture of the girl in the shower was in black-and-white, so I figured that he wouldn’t know the difference.

  I was wrong. He confronted me on the phone. Partly amused, partly miffed.

  “That’s not your real picture, is it.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You look like two completely different people.”

  “People always tell me that when I curl my hair.”

  “I don’t think either of these pictures are you.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  Not willing to argue with me about my fake identity, he pleasantly let me go. Ultimately, he stopped talking to me altogether. Lesson learned.

  Eventually, the online conversations and fake adult sex no longer filled the void that my socially inactive middle school life had left wide open. My friends were bein
g asked out. People were coupling up, and I was left with my lies and my fake personas. I needed someone to like me for me. Or at least who I pretended to be in person.

  FAT

  According to everything I read in both women’s and health magazines (those must be right, right?), I can look forward to obesity, diabetes, and horrible skin. That’s my prognosis, should I continue to indulge my food addiction. I’d like to blame it on the “new money,” i.e. money I’m now earning on my own as opposed to the money my parents have had to float me until recently—but even when I had no money, I still found a way to satiate my appetite for eating out. It’s probably my mom’s fault. After eighteen years of being limited to Fast Food Fridays (and sometimes Saturdays), I became obsessed with dining out. All the kids and teens on television had those hangout spots where they ate after-school junk food: The Max, The Peach Pit, The Honker Burger . . . the list goes on. Denied that as a kid, I live for social eating and, sometimes, solo social eating. (If people are around, people on my television screen included, that qualifies as “social eating” in my book.)

  If conversation is something I dread, eating is something I look forward to. I wake up excited for breakfast, which is, hands down, my favorite meal of the day. Sometimes, at dinner, I fantasize about what I’m going to eat for breakfast the next morning. If it’s the weekend, then I’ll spend an hour or two reading glowing Yelp reviews as I research new brunch places. That’s just my life.

  Even during my financially challenged days, when my fridge was practically empty, I always had an abundance of either milk or eggs—both, on a pay week—which meant cereal, omelettes, and/or pancakes were always an option. And during those super-lazy and broke breakfast moments, when all I had were slices of bread and eggs—French toast! The homemade variety is a rare breakfast indulgence for me, as my mom treated French toast as a food of last resort, using the ends of the bread loaves she’d kept in the freezer for Thanksgiving stuffing to make hers. It was good, but I’ve definitely bitten into some freezer-burned French toast, much to my offense.